Freyja | Fire | Arah, Henriik, Ru
Freyja had been halfway through her attempt to reassure Ru that her feelings were genuine when he began speaking again, his words seeming to venture closer to an explanation for his unusual behavior with every syllable.
“Before you jump to conclusions, like I know you will, please understand that I did try. The answers you wanted, Freyja, you weren’t going to get from her. She would have fed you half-truths and lies, anything to appeal to your emotions enough for you to hope that what she could have told you was true. And I thought… I thought I could extract the information you wanted, but when I tried, the messier it became, and the more I realized how much of a danger she posed. I didn’t mean to do it, not at first, but I- she’s gone. I killed her.”
The fire element’s hands went limp around his neck as she watched him with a glassy stare, initially unwilling to believe that he had taken something so valuable away from her.
“I… no. I… I want to see the body. I don’t believe you.” As her expression turned from denial toward some semblance of attempting to understand, she took a step back, relinquishing her body’s proximity to his but not fully pulling away. From betrayal she quickly moved into the comfort of control and strength in anger. Her eyes flashed from green to gold, and she looked him dead in the eye.
“This wasn’t real for you like it was for me, was it? You knew. You knew how important getting answers was for me and you took away my only chance at getting out of here. That was your plan all along, wasn’t it?” She sighed, overwhelmed, with tears threatening to spill out of her eyes. As he attempted to grab her wrist, she pulled it away from him with force, allowing her palm to warm to a point where he knew what would happen if he held on.
“My fault for thinking this was a real truce. I don’t need anyone’s help in utterly despising you this time,” she hissed, stepping back as Henriik began a series of antics that resulted in the pair coming to blows. Raising her hands in defeat, she called over her shoulder as she strutted out, “kill each other for all I care, you’re both dead to me.”
As Henriik paused to watch Freyja leave, he said in a low tone to Ru, “I know what happened in that cell. Stay away from her or I’ll tell everyone what you did.”
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For several hours, Freyja found herself drinking alone among the gravestones on the far side of the boathouse, far enough away from the madness to feel as if she could be alone with her thoughts. This was ultimately a false notion if Edward’s arrival had anything to do with it. He carried another bottle of alcohol with him, and he sat down silently in the grass beside the young woman.
“Perfect timing,” she mumbled, “Just when I thought I might have to break into the headmaster’s stash in an attempt to avoid coming up with an even more attention-grabbing exit.”
He offered her the bottle, and she took a swig, passing it back to him. He chuckled softly, studying her expression with such an attention to detail that she felt obligated to turn back toward him.
Reluctantly, Edward put down the bottle in the grass and reached out his hand to caress her cheek. The action was so delicate that it seemed as if she might disappear if he made the wrong movement. Although she was rather confused and certainly disinterested in pursuing a relationship with him, she allowed it, if only because it was a curious gesture that she had not been expecting from him.
“You are the most perfect specimen ever created,” he whispered, looking her in the eye. She turned away from him, picking up the bottle of alcohol in an attempt to diffuse the tension between them.
“You’re not so bad yourself for a man who goes around bartering for favors in his spare time.” She smiled teasingly, “perhaps not perfect, but few are. As a matter of fact, I can’t think of anyone other than the person you mentioned. Can you?”
“No,” he admitted, although there was a veracity in his voice that made her uneasy.
“Well, I do owe you something,” she flailed an arm, and the bottle went flying into the grass a second time. She moved into his personal bubble, weaving in and out of it with every hitch of his breath. Mere centimeters from closing the gap between them, she whispered, “how about we call it even?”
To her surprise, the second her lips reached his, he threw himself back with such force that she almost felt she had misjudged the series of events that had unfolded. “What the hell,” she exclaimed, studying him with bewilderment. Before she could do anything else, she was enveloped in a familiar purple haze, completely vulnerable to his will.
Despite his ability to wield magic, Edward was clearly in a frenzied state, causing Freyja to wonder if he’d ever been kissed before. He was being awfully strange about a kiss, and he’d even been acting strange before that. “You’re going to tell Henriik you want to do the pairing ceremony even if you don’t want to. Tell him that if you’re going to die, you at least want to die on your own terms. You’re going to stay away from Ruairi until after this all blows over. Don’t tell Arah anything about what happened while you were away.”
Only able to nod, she agreed as he sprung up from the grass, still no more tranquil than he had been prior. “You were never meant to be mine,” he said, although it seemed it was more to himself than to her. With that, he left her in the dark, dazed and trying to recall what had happened in the last moments.
As she arrived back to her dorm a few minutes after that interaction, Freyja swung the door open to find Henriik on Arah’s bed, sitting beside her. She seemed to have interrupted something private if their reactions had anything to do with it, but she did nothing to prevent herself from barreling into the tension, throwing the bottle of alcohol she’d acquired from Edward down on her bureau, in front of her mirror.
“Oh, good, you’re here.” She didn’t wait for a response before continuing in an equally patronizing tone. “I want to do the pairing ceremony with you, Henriik. If I’m going to die, I at least want it to be on my own terms.”
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News of Freyja’s agreement to Henriik’s informal proposal reached the higher levels of the academy quite rapidly, and she was given several days off from her classes to make arrangements for the actual ceremonies. Although she’d spent more of it soul searching and keeping herself unfathomably busy to avoid confronting any loose emotions, which had already come out in hysterics on more than one occasion, she’d managed to plan both ceremonies with little buy-in from the air element, who was too busy to spend any time with her, it seemed. Finally, the day arrived for the pair to have their official pairing proposal ceremony, and they had decided to do it quite publicly—as they’d done everything else.
Freyja arrived on Henriik’s arm after everyone had arrived, wearing a pale gray gown that she’d made many alterations to in order to allow it to live up to her standards. If she had to wear a color associated with the element she was pairing to, she at least wanted it to be fashionable. In contrast, Henriik looked extremely uncomfortable and out of place in a bright orange suit with red and black accents, something that drew much more attention to him than he was comfortable with. It seemed clear to Freyja that they could not have been more incompatible, yet she was allowing it to happen despite this.
“I thought that gown had sleeves,” Henriik said to Freyja in a low tone.
“And I thought that air elements were only allowed to pair with other air elements. And yet,” she shot back, without missing a beat.
“And yet.”
As they walked in, they were announced by the headmaster, whom they’d chosen as one of their sponsors. The other was the ethics professor, who, in his attempt to make the solemn event lighthearted, spent more of his speech recounting how glad he was that Freyja wasn’t going to be spending a lifetime with a certain water element student of his that remained unnamed than giving an account of Freyja’s actual life. Henriik’s uncle had done his job perfectly, giving a heartfelt and sincere eulogy for Henriik that provided all of the major details of his life as well as his well wishes for their potential afterlife together. Freyja’s eulogy not only reminded her that she had no life and no memories to recount, but also, due to frequent reminders, who was to blame for taking away her answers and why they seemed to blow up everything they touched together, both literally and figuratively. She kept her eyes glued to the lectern and the two speakers, keeping her mind busy as not to react in any measurable way in front of such a large crowd.
Finally, it came time for the exchange of black roses, and the preliminary vows. Henriik said his first, then she accepted the black rose from him, extending the other out to him as she repeated his words.
“Henriik Delamater, I would rather die with you than live one more day apart from you. I accept your proposal.” She swallowed the truth in a handful of breaths, though it burned in her chest and her stomach nonetheless.
As the crowd erupted into applause, Freyja glanced down, noticing the magic that the ethics professor was using to bring tattoos to light on their hands. As Henriik looked away, his already done, the professor briefly flashed an image of a water symbol amidst his weaving of Henriik’s symbol into her skin. As he blanched, Freyja did too. They made a brief moment of eye contact, as in mutual understanding of the faux pas and what it meant, before Freyja recovered and joined Henriik in revealing the new air symbol tattooed into her skin, as he was doing with hers. Briefly, she noticed his and recognized it. She wondered where it could have been from, and if she was having a memory from her past. This was unlikely, she thought, as she had never heard of an individual knowing their symbol of self until they had been paired. The thought struck her as odd as she and Henriik exited the stage, hand in hand.
As they took congratulations from many of the students in the courtyard, she was surprised to see the curly-haired blond approaching her. With his urgent request to talk to her, she almost agreed, but something deep within her blatantly disregarded this desire as if counteracted by a sense of obligation.
Repeating his words of wanting to talk to her, Freyja scoffed, eyeing him bitterly. Looking him straight in the eye, she replied, “I guess we don’t always get what we want, now do we?”
Turning on her heel and slipping her arm into the air element’s, she clearly stated a, “come on Henriik, let’s go elsewhere,” and walked off, leaving the water element to watch her leave.